The Underground Railroad of Biology

I dove into research. I reached out to the transgender community, the very community I had drifted from, now becoming my lifeline. They shared knowledge that the medical establishment hoarded: dosages, contraindications, and sources. I found a way to order hormones from overseas, bypassing the South African medical gatekeepers entirely.

On Friday, 28 February 2014, two weeks after the panel rejected me, I announced to my friends: “I am starting hormone treatment by myself.”

The concern was immediate. People warned me of blood clots, of liver failure, of the dangers of playing doctor. But they didn’t understand the necropolitics of my situation. I wasn’t choosing between “safe medical care” and “risky self-medication.” I was choosing between a slow, suffocating death as Dawie and a risky, vibrant life as Juanita.

“Hormones aren’t something I want,” I told them. “They are something I need for my survival.”

The Purge

I received my first batch: two testosterone blockers, estrogen, and progesterone. I designed my own titration schedule.

The first two weeks were uneventful. Then, the chemistry hit. My body went into revolt. I was nauseous constantly. Headaches split my skull. Some days, it felt as if my blood was boiling, a physical burning sensation that radiated through my limbs.

This was the war between the testosterone that had poisoned me for 34 years and the estrogen that was finally arriving to evict it. I didn’t care about the pain. In fact, I welcomed it. It was the feeling of a hostile occupation ending. For the first time, my body wasn’t just a cage; it was a construction site.

By the third month, the sickness faded. The “noise” in my head, the low-level hum of suicidal ideation that had been my constant companion since childhood, simply stopped.

I had seized the means of my own production. I was no longer a patient; I was a woman building herself.

The First Bloom

Three months into the self-medication regime, the war inside my body began to settle into a ceasefire.

I remember standing in the bathroom one morning in May. The Pretoria winter was approaching, the air dry and crisp. I was going through the mundane ritual of shaving, a task that used to be a source of violent dysphoria, a daily reminder of the testosterone poisoning my face.

But this morning was different.

As I ran my hand over my cheek to check for stubble, I stopped. The skin felt different. It wasn’t the rough, thick canvas I was used to. It was softer, thinner, almost translucent. I touched my arm. The coarse hair that had plagued me for decades was growing back slower, finer.

I leaned into the mirror, looking not at “Dawie” or “The Soldier,” but at the eyes staring back. The iris seemed brighter. The dull, yellow film of depression that usually coated my gaze had lifted.

But the most profound change was the smell.

For thirty-four years, my body had emitted the scent of a man, a sharp, metallic, acidic smell that no amount of cologne could mask. It was the scent of the enemy. Now, that smell was gone. In its place was something sweeter, softer, and entirely mine.

I wasn’t just imagining it. My biology was rewriting itself. The estrogen was scrubbing the “Colonel” out of my pores. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to crawl out of my own skin. I wanted to live in it.

The Supply Chain

This reclamation was not a solitary act. At first, I managed to bypass the local gatekeepers by ordering via the internet. I navigated gray-market websites, tracking packages from overseas, praying they would clear customs without being seized.

But when those channels dried up, as they often do in the precarious world of unauthorized medicine, the logistics of my survival shifted. I turned to a clandestine network of trans women who operated beneath the radar of the state.

We called it the “Underground Railroad,” a nod to the history of escaping slavery, because that is what it felt like; we were smuggling our bodies out of the prison of assigned gender.

Back then, everything was pills. We didn’t have access to sophisticated injectables or patches. It was blister packs of Estrofem and Androcur passed from hand to hand in parking lots or coffee shops.

“Here,” a friend would say, handing me the small cardboard box. “This will tide you over until the next shipment.”

They didn’t ask for money. They asked for updates. “How are your levels? Are you checking your liver function? Don’t die on us, Jua.”

These women, became my doctors, my pharmacists, and my priests. In a world where Necropolitics dictated that we should be let die, we kept each other alive. Every pill swallowed, every blue tablet dissolved under the tongue, was an act of revolutionary love.